Where do you rank em...

of course. do you know of any boxers who were into fencing? i've read that sweet pea did greco roman wrestling to enhance his boxing. if that helped pea, i'm sure fencing could have opened up some horizons.

 

Yeah, although i try to do it a little earlier than he describes so I don't accidentally **** up my undeveloped timing and hurt my hand in sparring. Against a heavy bag though i try to do it perfectly. His jab and straight technique is very different than what is taught today, the speed of the punches thrown in his school is slower but each individual hit is definitely more effective, because of how the weight is transferred. It defnitely works, holding your hands loose relaxes your shoulders and forearms, raising your punch speed and ease of parrying.

The best advice in his book is the defensive stuff and the how-to's on hooks and uppercuts, punches that I initially had trouble throwing with legit power before reading his book. Now i'd say those are my best punches. The defensive stuff is pretty good too. Interesting to see that he considers sways to be the last resort, which is something a lot of defensive fighters make a prime part of their defense today(sweet pea, PBF).

 

thanks for the info. good sparring doesn't really exist where i'm at. looking for something to help my progress.

 

When I initially made this account, yeah. I feel like now I'm somewhere in between a swarmer and a boxer-puncher, if that makes any sense. When I first started boxing my lateral movement was pretty terrible but my footspeed headspeed and head movement wasnt bad, so swarming felt pretty natural to me. I'm like 5'9 175-180. Now that my footwork has gotten better I like to move around a little bit on the outside with straight punches, box a little, and then move in and fight inside where I feel most comfortable. I'm not a pro or amateur or anything, my school schedule is too intense for any intense commitment to the sport besides training at the gym, but I do love to read and brush up on my technique for the sake of self improvement.

 

Which is part of the reason that the number of swarmers has declined with time. You need to have incredible conditioning, a good or great chin, quick hand and foot speed, and something that people tend to not associate with swarming fighters-great technique. There are very few pure swarmers out there right now, I think the last truly great one was Tyson. And he's a great example of how you need to be on top of your conditioning and mental game to be a truly effective swarmer.

It's interesting to note that a lot of the P4P GOATs are swarmers though(greb, armstrong, etc).